Ramsey's Gold

Chapter Five

Drake reread the note three times, wondering if it was for real. He had no memory of his father — or at least, nothing concrete. A vague recollection of a man at the first birthday party he could remember. Drake was four years old, wearing a red cowboy hat, playing pin the tail on the donkey. A hazy figure, male, tall, was there with his mother, but beyond that, he couldn’t form anything more. That was it for his dad, whom his mother had claimed had died in an accident. Beyond an insistence that he’d loved Drake and been a good man, she’d been reluctant to talk about him. When she did, it was always generalizations: that he’d been a writer and photographer, very smart, engaging. And that Drake shared some important qualities with him — a photographic memory and an ability to organize seemingly random data into patterns that were obvious to him, but eluded everyone else.

The few photos she’d shown him were of a handsome man in his early forties with a full head of Drake’s longish brown hair and a twinkle of merriment in his eye. Their resemblance was strong, but it was one that elicited nothing from Drake but an ache in his gut at the lost opportunity to know his dad.

And now, here was a connection with the past, his father’s thoughts and observations set down on paper in his own hand.

Ultimately, his curiosity got the better of him, and he unwound the string with a trembling hand before cracking the worn cover open to the first page.

Lynch returned, and seeing Drake reading the journal, left him to commune with the ghosts of the past in peace. Drake didn’t notice, so engrossed was he in his father’s account, and barely registered the passage of an hour. When Lynch entered again, Drake looked up from the journal as though surprised.

“I see you elected to read what Patricia left for you,” the attorney said.

“I…it’s really remarkable. What do you know about it?”

“Absolutely nothing beyond what I’ve told you. I was to arrange for you to come here, give you the check and the package, and give you Patricia’s final instructions. Which brings me to the next point. Have you decided whether you wish to keep it, or leave it with me for donation to the museum?”

Drake shook his head, pushed back from the table, and rose. “I’m taking it.”

“Then I have a further instruction that was based on your choice. Patricia had an insurance policy. Not a fortune, but substantial. I’ve been authorized to release the funds to you when they’re paid by the company.”

Drake hesitated. “Substantial? How substantial?”

“I believe the amount is seventy thousand dollars.”

Drake sat down again. He’d been broke yesterday, chasing scumbags through sketchy neighborhoods, and now he’d come into almost a hundred grand…and the most fascinating account he’d ever read, even though he was only halfway through it.

“Really? When will the policy pay out?” he asked.

“I’m waiting for the death certificate. Once I have that, it shouldn’t be more than five to ten days.”

Drake nodded mutely. He leaned forward, his hands folded in front of him on the table, the journal next to him. “How well did you know…Patricia?”

Lynch looked like he’d been expecting the question. “She was referred to me by another client. I handled some small legal matters for her. Contract review. That sort of thing. And of course, her will and estate planning, such as it was.”

“You say she died. How?”

“A car accident. The coroner said she died instantly on impact, so she didn’t suffer.”

“Where did she live?”

“In Idaho.” Lynch didn’t elaborate, and Drake sensed that he wouldn’t be forthcoming with any more information. But he had to try.

“Do you have any idea why she’d have changed her name?”

Lynch shook his head and cleared his throat. “You now have all the information I do. Perhaps you could leave me your banking details, and I’ll arrange for a wire transfer when we receive the insurance payout?”

Drake closed his eyes and recited his bank details from memory, which Lynch dutifully recorded on the ledger’s signature page. When he was done, Lynch rose and cleared his throat.

“That’s it, then. I’ll contact you before we send the funds so you know they’re on their way. Thank you for coming in. Oh, and here’s the check for the two thousand, along with three hundred dollars for your hotel.”

Drake took the check. The firm had paid for his airline ticket, so that concluded their business, other than the insurance. Lynch shook hands with Drake and then showed him out to the waiting area. Drake asked the receptionist to call him a taxi and took the elevator to the ground level, his father’s journal in one pocket and a small fortune in the other.

He had the driver take him to the nearest branch of the bank that had issued the checks, and waited patiently in line before cashing them, ignoring the suspicious look of the porcine teller at his request for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills.

The cab was still in the lot when he came out of the bank, wads of hundreds in the pockets of his cargo pants. He gave the driver his hotel name and settled into the seat. His mind raced at how his day had gone thus far: He now had a stack of Benjamins two inches thick, no urgent plans, and his father’s legacy to pore over.

Drake ate a late lunch, treating himself to a beer with his hamburger as he read at a quiet table at the back of the hotel restaurant. When the waiter arrived to take his empty plate, Drake was surprised — half an hour had flown by like seconds as he’d been sucked into the little book. He paid the bill, returned to his room, and spent the rest of the day reading. By evening he’d finished, and the hotel courtesy pad was filled with scribbled notes.

According to Ford Ramsey, in the 1600s, persecuted by the invading Spanish, the Incas had spirited away the empire’s collected wealth to a new capital in the jungle where it would be safe: Paititi, the Inca city of gold. For a century, the city prospered, and then something changed — as near as Ramsey had been able to put together, the water that fed the metropolis became tainted and the population lost the ability to reproduce. Ultimately the last inhabitants passed away, leaving a ghost city in the jungle. Since then, for hundreds of years, adventurers had gone in search of it, returning empty-handed…when they returned at all. Ramsey had collected every bit of data from even the most obscure sources and cobbled together a rough idea of the city’s location, somewhere in the eastern jungles of Peru, or the westernmost edges of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He’d isolated a spot where a meteor had struck at some point in the 1700s, possibly contaminating the water table, and had narrowed his search to that region.

The journal described in detail the logic his father had used to arrive at his deductions, which included his conviction that a set of outposts had been set up by the Incas along the route to Paititi to guide travelers to the city. Find the remaining outposts, and Paititi was within reach. Drake’s father believed he’d figured out where the final outposts in the chain were, after his penultimate trip to Peru.

When Drake got to the final chapter, the story took a more ominous turn. In dispassionate language, his father described being approached by an unnamed American intelligence service and been made an offer he couldn’t refuse, a secret conscription he’d been forbidden to share with anyone.

That entry was the last in the journal.

Drake sat back and eyed the little book. His investigative reporter instinct was aroused, and by the final pages he better understood why his father had felt compelled to go in search of the lost city. Not only because Paititi would have been a once-in-a-lifetime find, but because he’d apparently been forced to cooperate in the interests of national security — although why an Inca city was of interest to the U.S. government was perhaps an even greater mystery than Paititi itself.

Drake stared at the notes and gathered his conflicted thoughts. He’d just gotten a glimpse of how his father’s brain worked — the familiar gathering of seemingly disparate information and recognition of a symmetry nobody else had seen — and in spite of his better judgment, he felt himself getting sucked into his father’s world. After studying the scrawled names and circling several, he activated his iPad, did a search for Paititi and found numerous sites. He read about the legend of the lost treasure, and even as he did so he realized that he, too, felt the tug of the city of gold.

Not that he was planning on actually searching for any Inca treasure. That was idiocy. But he couldn’t see any harm in trying to locate his father’s closest friend to learn what he knew about Ford Ramsey’s last days. Drake certainly had the spare time to do it, now that he’d lost his job and had money in his pocket.

The first step would be to use his skip-tracing skills to track the man down. Drake loaded a website he used to locate fugitives and typed. The interface flashed at him twice. He sat back as it churned, the letters blinking hypnotically onscreen. A window popped up and he studied the readout and then entered more information. Another menu illuminated, and it quickly became obvious that it wouldn’t be as straightforward as he’d hoped. There were hundreds of hits, and Drake had little else to go on other than the man’s new name, which was as vanilla as they came.

Jack Brody.

That’s all he had.

But with perseverance, it would be enough.